Steve Urbon: Militarized police a threat from within

America's image in the world took a beating this week thanks to the police in a small Missouri town called Ferguson.

America's image in the world took a beating this week thanks to the police in a small Missouri town called Ferguson.

Ferguson and the other towns in its county near St. Louis have been on the receiving end of some of the more than $4 billion in surplus military equipment that the Pentagon has been handing out since the 9/11 attacks.

And when an 18-year-old African-American named Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer under questionable circumstances, and people took to the streets to demand justice, the weaponry was turned on them.

What they got was a faceful of gun barrels. The almost all-white police department in an almost all-black town rolled in with armored vehicles, police equipped like soldiers in camouflage and body armor, brandishing not just nightsticks but assault weapons, some held by officers sitting on top of the armored trucks.

"Serve and protect" went out the window early on when looters torched the convenience store where Brown was shot.

Evidently unable to tell who were peaceful demonstrators and who were troublemakers, the police started lobbing tear gas and firing rubber bullets to disperse the entire crowd, telling them to get out and go home and that their rights weren't being violated, which they of course were.

And to keep all of this from going out on the news, the police arrested a handful of journalists and tear-gassed an Al Jazeera camera crew.

We taxpayers paid for it all. We've been paying for a bloated defense budget that got that way because we demanded that the nation be safe from terrorism and ready for it if it came.

Police departments, some of whom may not have been paragons of community partnership, stocked up on weapons, vehicles, ammunition, body armor, you name it.

Some of these police were pretty itchy to use all these lethal toys that the Pentagon gave them.

In fact, in a Friday op-ed piece in The New York Times, two leaders of the Friends Committee on National Legislation wrote that federal law actually requires the equipment be put to use within a year of its arrival.

Not everywhere, but in some places, militarizing the police has warped their mission, with the people they are supposed to serve and protect turning into a mortal threat, the enemy.

So where is New Bedford? I spoke with Eddie Johnson, a community activist who declared himself fairly satisfied with the community's relationship with the Police Department.

While there have been incidents that led to protests, the situation hasn't mushroomed into violence. Johnson answered an emphatic "NO!" when I asked him if what happened in Ferguson could happen here. Here, "people are more organized, more civilized," he said.

New Bedford does, in fact, own some of that military equipment, weapons and vests and that sort of thing.

The one that stands out is the Bearcat, an armored, mine-resistant vehicle with a $390,000 sticker price, courtesy of Uncle Sam.

We simply don't see it much. Police Chief David Provencher reminded me that it was used in a standoff a couple of years back with a gunman holed up in a Phillips Road apartment complex. Police could approach much closer inside that vehicle and the situation was disarmed.

"I see it mainly as a support vehicle, moving men and resources in and out of a scene safely and quickly," he said.

"There's a place for this equipment," he said, "but only with a convincing context." In this case the Bearcat made the difference. "It leveled the playing field."

Provencher said that there have been any number of cases nationally in which heavily armed people hole up and do battle with the police. Police need those heavier weapons, he said.

"At the end of the day, one of my main missions at every level is to preserve life. I have a responsibility to make sure that when cops go home at the end of the day, they didn't have to use their weapon."

If Pentagon-supplied equipment makes them safer, "then I'm all for it," he said. "I'd rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it," he said.

It's a compelling argument, but some who aren't so level-headed are taking this nation's communities, and its reputation, over the cliff. Militarized police are a loaded gun pointed at ourselves.

Steve Urbon's column appears in The Standard-Times and SouithCoastToday,com. He can be reached at 508-979-4448 or surbon@s-t.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveUrbonSCT

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